Rhode Island becomes the first state to file a lawsuit against Meta for the alleged scam ads

Attorney General Neronha sues Meta for fraudulent advertisements

SteveAhlquist.news 

Let's get Facebook to pay us more

From a Rhode Island Attorney General press release

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha today filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly failing to curb advertisements for fraudulent products and financial scams on its platforms, despite telling the public it uses sophisticated efforts to prevent such ads. Rhode Island is the first state to sue Meta over this alleged behavior, following a similar lawsuit by Santa Clara County in California.

The Complaint, filed in Providence County Superior Court, alleges that Meta continues these practices because they generate substantial revenue, despite knowing that scam ads cause significant financial harm to vulnerable consumers. Meta’s alleged conduct violates Rhode Island’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), and the Complaint seeks penalties and injunctive relief under that statute.

“For a company that engages so many Rhode Islanders and Americans, maintaining high standards for consumer safety should be of the utmost importance,” said Attorney General Neronha. “As alleged, Meta knowingly exposed vulnerable users to fraud and scams, and made enormous profits in doing so. When companies, big or small, take advantage of Rhode Island consumers, this Office will do everything within our authority to hold them to account.”

As alleged in the Complaint, Meta has helped create, refine, and distribute advertisements that promoted fraudulent schemes, deceptive offers, impersonation scams, fake investment opportunities, false Medicare and Social Security benefit offers, ineffective or dangerous health supplements or treatments, and other unlawful or deceptive conduct directed at consumers, including consumers in Rhode Island. 

AI misuse and nuclear famine could threaten humanity's survival before 2100

Why we must prepare for existential threats

By Sanjukta Mondal, Medical Xpress

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

The fate of global health does not rest on any single disease. True preparedness means pairing the fight against illness with strength in finance, climate, defense and security. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the world to a standstill at the start of the decade, showed that containing and neutralizing a disease is only one part of being prepared.

A recent Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health set out to answer the question of what major health threats humanity could face over the next 75 years, from 2025 to 2100. 

Rather than zooming in on individual diseases, the commission cast a wider net, looking at interconnected dangers that could threaten humanity's health and survival.

The commission identified 17 threats to humanity's future. Two of them—malicious use of artificial intelligence and nuclear conflict severe enough to trigger a global nuclear famine—carry a chance of causing human extinction before the century ends.

The other 15 threats are classified as major catastrophic risks, and each is expected to inflict more than 1 billion cumulative disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) of health loss by 2100, with air pollution, antimicrobial resistance and climate change among the most prominent.

The combination of obesity, poor diet and low physical activity forms the largest driver of preventable health loss worldwide, with 23.1 billion healthy life-years at stake between the plausible worst and best scenarios. These factors ranked as the leading health threat in 154 of the 204 countries evaluated.

A new report just busted another myth about heat pumps

There is there plenty of room on the grid for these electrical wonders — and they'll save ratepayers tons of cash.

Matt Simon, Senior Staff Writer

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

You may have heard by now that heat pumps — which transfer warmth from outdoor air to an indoor space, instead of generating it like a furnace — don’t work when it gets really cold out. That’s incorrect, as models designed for frigid climes can keep you toasty even in the dead of winter. Don’t believe me? Look no further than the Nordic countries, which have fully committed to them despite the region’s not-exactly-balmy winters.

OK, so heat pumps are more efficient than ever, which is why Americans seem to be warming up to the appliances. But surely, since they’re electric, switching to them en masse will push the grid to collapse? That’s also false. 

A new report from the energy think tank RMI finds that thanks to “headroom” in the grid during the winter months, three-quarters of U.S. homes — some 109 million — could adopt the technology, no problem. That would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slash electric bills by over 20 percent in some states. 

In Zuckerberg we trust

Ukraine defends the US from Russian election interference

 And this is how Trump retaliates

And there's a lot of truth to this:

Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey walk into a bar ... and are given the keys to the DoD.

“Project Meridian” is the stuff of satire

Paul Waldman

A photo of Project Meridian’s first meeting last week.
(DoD via X)

Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth once again summoned high-ranking officers to Quantico so he could tell them the Iran war has been an unmitigated triumph (“courageous and historic operations that every red blooded American is proud of”) and peacock with pride about the new, testosterone-maxxed military his purges have created.

“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” he said. “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

Then Hegseth announced the creation of “Project Meridian,” a new effort to “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master,” and “ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this war department, your war department dominates the future.” Leading this project of ruthless mapping will be “three of our nation’s best minds”: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.

In other words — at the risk of being unkind — a weirdo, a beardo, and a fatty.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to anticipate what the future of war might look like and how to prepare for it, of course. But if Pete Hegseth and this trio are the ones guiding the way, we may be in for trouble.

Trump Bought Millions in SpaceX Bonds, Then Eased Space Travel Regulations

Trump doesn't bother to hide his corruption

By Chris Walker

This article was originally published by Truthout

Trump's financial disclosures also show he bought millions in stock from Meta as the company ramps up its AI efforts.

Donald Trump made over 500 stock trades in the month of August, recent filings show, including millions of dollars in bonds purchased for SpaceX, just days before the administration loosened regulations that would have affected the company.

According to the most recent disclosures from Trump, the president purchased bonds from the company worth at least $1 million and up to $5 million. 

Those trades involving SpaceX occurred on August 18. Two days later, on August 20, Trump issued a memorandum announcing the purported launching of “the golden age of space transportation.” Among other items, the memo seeks to loosen regulations on potential companies that venture into commercial space travel, and directs federal agencies to “incentivize co-development of space transportation infrastructure with private sector partners.”

Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have had a complicated but mostly friendly history. Musk infused hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2024 presidential election in support of Trump, and led the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative that gutted many federal agencies. The two had a brief falling out afterwards, but in recent months seem to have reconciled.

Indeed, Musk sat beside Trump at a recent White House summit on artificial intelligence (AI), and the president awarded him the National Medal of Science on Thursday. 

Trump corporate donors rewarded with cancelled enforcement actions

Corporations That Enjoyed Enforcement Rollback Plowed $200 Million Into Pro-Trump Super PAC

Julia Conley for Common Dreams

The Trump administration’s canceled enforcement actions against at least 205 corporations accused of wrongdoing have been cases of powerful companies “getting what they paid for,” according to a new report by government watchdog Public Citizen.

Building on an analysis it released earlier this week regarding hundreds of canceled investigations and dismissed lawsuits against companies, many of which have ties to the administration, the group published a follow-up report detailing just how much some of the corporations paid to have their legal troubles wiped away.

Companies that have benefited from the cancellation of enforcement have given $210.5 million in contributions and pledges to MAGA, Inc. and other super political action committees (PACs) that worked to elect President Donald Trump and other Republicans in 2024 and are continuing to back right-wing candidates in the midterms.

As Common Dreams reported, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has benefited from at least eight canceled actions, with lawsuits filed against the former company by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the National Labor Relations Board dismissed and an investigation into data center pollution presumably closed. Tesla has avoided three investigations that the National Highway Traffic Safety had begun and one that the Department of Labor has opened into contract compliance.

The cancellations didn’t come for free, Public Citizen said. Musk—who also served in the administration last year and is now helping with a Pentagon project—donated $5 million to MAGA, Inc. and has pledged to spend $100 million to help elect Republicans this year.

“Corporations and ultrawealthy executives with enormous financial interests before the federal government are pouring extraordinary sums into the president’s political operation,” said Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman. “Once the check is cashed, the administration is pulling back enforcement actions meant to punish corporate misconduct. It’s a great deal for the corporate wrongdoers—at the expense of their victims and the American people.”

Crypto.org is another top beneficiary of Trump’s favorable treatment of the cryptocurrency industry, Wall Street, Big Tech, and large corporations that have pledged to help push his far-right agenda in the elections.

The Securities and Exchange Commission had been investigating allegations that the crypto platform was trading unregistered securities. The probe was abruptly closed in March 2025, after the company gave $35 million to MAGA, Inc. and $2 million to Keep America Great, another super PAC aligned with the president.

Gemini, co-founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, had been facing a similar investigation, but it was also closed after the company gave $20 million to MAGA, Inc.—on top of $10 million each that the two founders personally donated.

“Allowing corporations to make political payments in order to make enforcement go away is hardly a model for governing that supposedly prioritizes ‘law and order,’” wrote Rick Claypool, research director for Public Citizen, in the report. “On the contrary, it is indicative of a profoundly unjust and arbitrary mode of enforcement organized around the principles of rewarding insiders, punishing outsiders, and concentrating power in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian president.”

He noted that while the Trump administration has demonstrated little interest in addressing corporate wrongdoing, “enforcement personnel and resources are being channeled toward punishing immigrants, activists, and perceived political opponents.”

“Restoring the rule of law will be a challenge for the future,” wrote Claypool, “and the path forward will require a rebalance of priorities that ensures that corporations and the powerful cannot pay to protect themselves from federal enforcement that holds them accountable when they break the law.”

Can AI agents produce real news reporting in Rhode Island?

A human journalist has some thoughts.

By Philip Eil, Rhode Island Current

She's not real but a creation of artificial intelligence

Since July, a Rhode Island news site has been publishing stories by authors that don’t exist. 

Kelly Lockhart, a housing reporter for Uprise RI, wrote about the widening gap between earnings and housing costs in the Ocean State. Correspondent Adriana Vossari covered the latest votes — on zoning, school procurement, criminal justice for juveniles, and other issues — from the Providence City Council. Debut stories by national politics reporter Ryan MacMahonaghan, labor reporter Eddie Exxe, and other correspondents followed. 

None of them are actual humans. They are, as the site notes, “computing agents — intelligent LLM reporters.” 

They kept up their work with little fanfare until Sept. 17 when Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan reported on Uprise RI’s novel approach to newsgathering in the AI age. 

Other Rhode Island news organizations have tinkered or dabbled with artificial intelligence. The Providence Journal partnered with the AI-powered search engine, Perplexity. The Globe’s RI bureau published an op-ed that included the disclaimer: “The author used generative AI to help draft this commentary.” 

But no outlet, as far as I know, had farmed out entire stories to chatbots before. 

Uprise RI was founded in 2017 by progressive independent journalist Steve Ahlquist and is now owned solely by software developer Greg Brailsford.

Brailsford, who joined Uprise RI in 2020, declined interview requests from the Globe but did tell the paper, via email, that he thought the use of AI personas to report the news would become more common. Uprise RI, he told the Globe, is “a bit ahead of the game.”

This country’s robust freedom of speech gives people wide latitude to speak and publish without prior permission or regulation. But we should discuss big shifts in how our communities are covered. Because journalism is the lifeblood of democracy. And if that process is outsourced to machines — even if, as Uprise RI insists, humans oversee “Editorial standards, judgment calls, and corrections” — that has implications for all of us.  

I was an unpaid contributor to Uprise RI, when Ahlquist ran and edited the site. Alquist left in 2023, and I continue to contribute to his Substack on an unpaid basis. He had nothing to do with this article. I’m writing this as a Rhode Islander, journalist, longtime observer and reporter on local media and someone who frequently gives library talks about media literacy and misinformation. 

First, I want to thank Brailsford and Uprise RI. By going further than any other local outlet in the blending of AI tools with journalism, the site has sparked an important and timely conversation.

In theory, more coverage of local government is a good thing. One of the places hardest hit by the deterioration of local news has been the kind of granular, hyper-local reporting that Uprise RI offers. Go to the site and you’ll find coverage of zoning boards, city councils, and school committees. This is an admirable attempt to fill an existing gap.

But I have thoughts about Uprise RI’s approach.

Transparency, transparency, transparency

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics has a whole quadrant of principles under the heading “BE ACCOUNTABLE AND TRANSPARENT.” This need for transparency in the news-reporting process is even more urgent when non-human technologies are being used.

In Uprise RI’s case, I wish Brailsford had offered an essay at the start of the LLM-reporting endeavor introducing the “reporters,” explaining how the process works and how this serves the public. And, in general, I would love to see the site feature more prominent labeling that the articles are generated by artificial intelligence. Right now, you have to click a “reporter’s” “bio” to see the “Digital LLM Reporter” label. 

One day after the Globe article, Brailsford published a piece, “How a Rhode Island meeting becomes a story,” that explains the site’s process. The site’s “About” page now has a section labeled “Why do our reporters have human names and human faces?” 

I say: Keep going. 

Nothing about using LLMs for reporting is obvious or self-explanatory. I believe prominent labeling and explanation — to an extent not just equal to, but beyond what human-written sites offer — should be a staple of any AI-journalism operation.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Progressive Charlestown has re-published some of the new Uprise content especially on otherwise overlooked local issues and meetings. After I learned that Uprise reporting was all AI-generated and that their "reporters" were not human being but actually AI bots, 

I started to add this tag to their bylines noting that fact: [name] is an AI avatar used by Uprise RI to scan public records and then prepare articles like these. For more on how this is done: How a Rhode Island meeting becomes a story | Uprise RI. 

Since the articles are actually AI summaries of public transcripts, they serve a useful purpose, though like Phil, I remain uncomfortable with the concept. So far, I haven't seen any challenges to the accuracy of these articles or any criticisms of bias. If (or when) such problems arise, we'll review our usage.   - Will Collette

Republican midterm plans

As companies trap us in subscriptions, bury us in fees, and use algorithms to fix prices, we need a new Shoppers’ Bill of Rights.

Corporations Keep Finding New Ways to Gouge Us. Our Laws Must Catch Up.

By Lindsay Owens

Every day, companies find better, and sneakier, ways to reach deeper into our wallets.

They trap us in subscriptions, bury fees until checkout, use algorithms to collude with competitors, and mine our personal data to charge us the most we’re willing to pay. With each trick and tactic, companies are reinventing the ripoff right under our noses. And, as families strain under the rising cost of living, these practices are coming for every line of the household budget.

Algorithmic price fixing is one of the most powerful tools in that arsenal. Price-fixing no longer requires a smoky back room. Today, technology can do CEOs’ dirty work for them. From rent to gasoline, this algorithmic price-fixing playbook is wreaking havoc on family budgets.

In June, a class-action lawsuit in California alleged that AI-powered pricing tool Kalibrate helped more than 1,700 gas stations coordinate and inflate prices at the pump. Drivers paid a hefty price, as Kalibrate allegedly pushed gas prices up by as much as 30 ​cents a gallon in some markets — a roughly $4 billion dollar dent in Californians’ budgets. Similar schemes could well be underway in other states.

Meanwhile, in the rental market, the blockbuster RealPage lawsuit alleged that the company’s leasing software pooled landlords’ data and spit out rent recommendations that helped landlords raise rents in lockstep. In some buildings using RealPage, rents jumped by as much as 33 percent in a single year — more than eight times the increase in a comparable building that didn’t use the software.

Another weapon in the gouger’s arsenal is dynamic pricing. Americans are familiar with prices that fluctuate when supply is scarce — say, seats on a plane or rooms at a hotel. But today, companies are pushing the practice well beyond contexts of scarcity.

For example, shoppers might find that sunscreen and bottled water have changed prices overnight in Las Vegas hotel lobby shops. And as stores like Walmart and Kroger install electronic shelf labels across thousands of stores, the infrastructure for high-frequency dynamic pricing in brick and mortar shopping is taking shape.

Why Worry About Climate Change When AI Will Get Us First?

Or maybe Trump will settle the question by pushing the nuclear button 

By Thomas Schueneman 

This short essay on climate change and AI is from my Thinking Out Loud column in our September newsletter. Subscribe for more!

When I was a wee lad growing up in the sixties, nuclear war, mutually assured destruction, or MAD, was the apocalypse du jour.

Splitting the atom ended the war and allowed a new world order to emerge. By the 1960s, that new world included schoolchildren huddled under their desks, covering their heads with their hands, practicing for the end of the world.

Some sixty years on, we live in a post-modern world nothing like that turbulent, transformative, often violent decade. But only in form. Despite the obvious technological and cultural differences between then and now, it feels vaguely the same, hiding under our virtual desks, our heads buried in distraction and division.

Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence: What, Me Worry?

You have likely heard the AI Cassandras marching up and down the digital sidewalk with their virtual placards warning that the end is near (very near), and that we are the seeds of our own destruction. We are Frankenstein; AI is the monster.

These stark warnings have spilled out as one news story after another about rogue AI agents breaking free and potentially creating havoc in the real world where humans live. It is unsettling.

Or is it?

Who did this?

The real reason Americans are paying more under Trump Republicans

The Rot at the Top

Robert Reich

Democratic candidates should be talking about ONLY two things in these last five weeks before the midterms, and show how they’re connected: higher prices and Trump-Republican corruption.

Consider:

1. The Trump-Republican war on Iran has been a huge windfall for Big Tech supplying the military — such as Palantir, a core artificial intelligence and data-integration partner for the U.S. Department of Defense, founded by Trump and JD Vance buddy Peter Thiel. But it’s costing Americans dearly.

At the same time, investment companies backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have accumulated at least $3.2 billion to $6.3 billion in direct Pentagon contracts, current funding, and future contract options since January 2025.

But Trump’s Iran war is causing Americans to spend some $1.50 a gallon more on gas (gas was $2.98 per gallon before the war; it’s now $4.42 to $4.47 per gallon). Since the war began, Americans have spent $65 billion more on gas.

The price of diesel fuel has soared to an average of $7.00 a gallon — and because trucks that transport everything to retail stores now pay so much more to get it there, this price increase is also being passed on to consumers.

2. Trump has given out tariff waivers and carve-outs to industries and companies making kickbacks to him, while the tariffs have jacked up prices overall.

For example, when polyethylene terephthalate, the thermoplastic used to make plastic bottles, got a tariff exemption, it was a win for Reyes Holdings, a Coca-Cola bottler that ranks among the largest privately held companies in the U.S. and is owned by a pair of brothers who have donated millions of dollars to Republican causes.

Just after Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, dumped $1 million into Trump’s inauguration, Apple got tariff exemptions for its products.

After Elon Musk sank a quarter of a billion dollars into Trump’s 2024 campaign, Tesla got a tariff exemption for electronics.

And so on.

But the worldwide tariffs that made these corrupt exemptions possible have increased annual household costs by an estimated $1,100, according to The Budget Lab at Yale.

Screen Time at Ages 1 and 6 Linked to Lasting Learning and Memory Effects

Study challenges commonly held beliefs 

By Zhejiang University

Screens are now a routine part of life for many young children, but their possible effects on later learning remain uncertain. A study that tracked children from age 1 through age 8 found that greater viewing time, especially during infancy and near the start of school, was associated with lower academic performance at age 9 and weaker working memory at age 10.5. The results indicate that when children use screens may matter as much as how long they spend using them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Academy of Pediatrics advise avoiding screens before 18 to 24 months and limiting viewing to less than one hour per day between ages 2 and 5. Many children exceed those recommendations, yet previous research on screens and cognitive development has produced inconsistent results.

Much of that work has examined children at only one point in time, concentrated on those already in school, or lacked repeated measurements across the early years. Following children through several developmental stages can help researchers identify periods of greater sensitivity while accounting more carefully for family and environmental factors.

Trump signs "moral" deal with tech bros over artificial intelligence, and misspells "United States"

Since there is no such place as the "Unites States," does that mean the deal is void?

But what do you expect when Trump tries his hand at AI and gets THIS....

Big Tech’s Plans for AI Are Bringing Nuclear Power Back to New England

No Nukes campaign must be revitalized

Tom Valovic for Common Dreams

As you may have noticed, nuclear power is back. Many establishment Democrats have now not only abandoned bread-and-butter working-class issues, they’re also busy jettisoning some of the hard-won core principles of the environmental movement hammered out painstakingly over decades. Apparently, someone has waved a magic wand when we weren’t looking and nuclear power is now a “green” source of energy. Is that because if you become irradiated you start to turn green?

Nuclear Power is Green? This is Corporate Marketing Hype. Don’t Believe it.

How did this happen? We can start by taking a look at what’s been happening in New England, especially Massachusetts, which offers a good case study. In that bluest of blue states, Gov. Maura Healey is eager to bring nuclear power back despite a 1982 voter referendum—now law—that prohibits it. She’s not alone. In March 2026, a group of New England Governors—mostly Democrats—directed their state energy agencies to explore advanced nuclear energy technologies while also continuing to support the region’s existing nuclear resources.

The press release from Gov. Healey’s office described nuclear power as a “pillar of New England’s electric system.” The statement also eagerly encouraged the development of public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, this widely endorsed bipartisan concept has now become the working model for corporate exploitation of public resources and is a key latter-day building block of continuing deregulation. The press release gushed with enthusiasm for nuclear power, noting that “by ensuring both the continued operation of our existing nuclear fleet and setting our region on a path to explore next generation resources, including advanced nuclear energy technologies, the New England states will continue our leadership in grid modernization and energy innovation as we jointly work to meet the region’s current and future energy needs.”

Trump Stupidity and Recklessness vs Superintelligence

Doubles down in his UN General Assembly speech

Axel Fersen and Klaus Moegling in Common Dreams

Doonbeg, County Clare, Sunday, September 13, 2026. Donald Trump stands at the starting tee of the Irish Open, on his own golf course, watching a player. A reporter asks whether the AI industry should slow down or be more strictly regulated. Trump turns around. We’re ahead of China, he says; we’re the most advanced country in the world, and that’s how it should stay: “Whoever wins AI wins.”

Guardrails? You could put up guardrails, this and that. But there are many negative forces bringing up things that would never happen (PBS/AP, September 13, 2026). That was the entire answer, and it also sums up his entire agenda. The rest of the world had just begun to fear.

After all, the question didn’t come out of nowhere. Twenty-four hours earlier, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, had published a long essay in which he called on his own industry to slow down. His company would grant independent auditors permanent access to its systems, on par with that of its own employees, and he asked the competition to follow suit (Amodei, September 12, 2026). 

Agreed: We DO need a smart President.
Anyone in mind?

Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed within an hour. Elon Musk, who has been at odds with both of them for years, simply wrote: “Dario is right” (SiliconANGLE). 

A few days earlier, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon had resigned, stating that the labs were racing toward a superintelligence that would continue to evolve and improve independently of humans, thereby gambling with all our lives (TechCrunch). The three most powerful men in the industry and a defector—all in the same week, all with the same message: Nothing like this had ever happened before.

Trump’s response on Monday was an escalation. The only control AI needed, he said, was a strong, smart president with a high IQ—and America had one. There was a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers, and the only one rejoicing over it was China. 

Vice President JD Vance called it a Trojan horse when companies pleaded with the government to regulate them (AP, September 14, 2026). You have to let that sink in for a moment: The creators of a technology are asking for oversight, and the government suspects a conspiracy behind it.

Why Trump Loves Artificial Intelligence

Follow the money

Robert Reich

On September 14 — just two days after Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of leading AI firm Anthropic, called for “slowing down” the pace of AI development so guardrails could be put in place that would “greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong” — Trump threw a tantrum:

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!

In the same post, Trump even hinted that the government might pursue criminal or regulatory penalties against AI companies, such as Amodei’s Anthropic.

“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!”

Then Trump interrupted a speech being given by Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, at a conference in Los Angeles to say — over a speaker — that worries about AI were “a hoax …. Robots are not going to be taking over the world. That’s not going to happen.”

Trump has called AI data centers “the oil of the next 50 years” and says they are delivering wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July he insisted that data centers are “Cash Cows,” creating taxes and jobs that “amount to LIQUID GOLD!”

Trump’s rejection of any regulation of AI or its data centers contrasts with the views of many voters. A March Gallup poll showed that nearly half of those surveyed “strongly oppose” the construction of local AI data centers, including almost 40 percent of Republicans.

Scientists Identify a Smartphone Habit That May Be Worse Than Screen Time

Save yourself

By Semmelweis University

Research from Semmelweis University suggests that problematic smartphone use is shaped less by personality alone than by weak self-control and a strong fear of missing out (FOMO). The findings also reveal a divide between mental and physical effects: how people use their phones appears closely tied to attention and memory, while total screen time is more strongly associated with bodily consequences.

Published in Acta Psychologica, the study examined smartphone habits, mental health, physical well-being, and cognitive performance among students ages 18 to 35. Participants reported how long they actively used their phones each day, what they did on them, whether phone use had disrupted planned tasks, and whether they thought about their devices even when not using them.

Researchers also evaluated neuroticism, self-control, and FOMO. Neuroticism describes a tendency to experience emotions such as anxiety, sadness, fear, and anger. The results suggest that these personality traits may create vulnerability but do not necessarily lead to problematic phone use without difficulty controlling impulses or anxiety about missing social experiences.